Member Avatar for Dani

Over the past day and a half, I've worked on generating our own in-house thumbshots service, instead of relying on the commercial product at thumbshots.com for the website screenshots seen when hovering over links and in member profiles. Doing so will save us $500 a month, so that's good news :)

Unfortunately, the alternative to spending the money to outsource the service means a lot more stress and overhead on our own servers. We're currently working on building up a screenshot library, so please excuse the 'Thumbshot Coming Soon' messages that are quite prevalent now. It should be just another day or so before we have most websites captured.

In the meantime, it seems like on average once a particular website screenshot is requested at least 4 or 5 times (even refreshing the page works), it will be queued and ready about ten minutes later.

  • 6 Contributors
  • 10 Replies
  • 417 Views
  • 5 Days Discussion Span
  • Latest Post Latest Post by Dani
<M/> commented: You were using a service before? +0

Recommended Answers

All 10 Replies

Member Avatar for Ancient Dragon

Seems to be working ok as far as I can tell. Hover the mouse over a link and I see the correct thumbnail.

Member Avatar for happygeek

Nice one Dani. As AD says, seems to be mostly working already.

(later) OK, so having posted that all I see now are the coming soon messages - typical :)

Edited by happygeek
Member Avatar for DavidB

At the moment, links in the main forum work fine for me.

However, I notice the home page listed in my Profile still shows "Coming Soon", although the actual link works.

Edit (5 minutes later): Oops, it is working fine now, just like before.

Edited by DavidB
Member Avatar for Dani

Edit (5 minutes later): Oops, it is working fine now, just like before.

Yup, like I said, it should show up within 10 minutes of being requested one or two times. You visiting your profile was a request ;)

Member Avatar for <M/>

I don't know if its me, but I don't think you should use a black background with the yellow text. It doesn't go well with the rest of the site.

You should use the grey you use in the footer or in the body of the web pages with a purple font that you use for the links.

Edited by <M/>
Member Avatar for Dani

Yeah, you're probably right. I've been really busy over the past few days, and I'll be heading into the city for the SMX conference today, so not sure when I'll actually get to it though ;)

Member Avatar for Dani

Color changed for the 'coming soon' images to suit Michael's suggestion. And we're pretty much all caught up now with the backlog of fetching thumbshots.

commented: I feel so loved :D lol +0
Member Avatar for <M/>

Color changed for the 'coming soon' images to suit Michael's suggestion.

Awwww, i feel so much love :D

Just kidding, nice job, it looks better now but i think you can make the grey slighty lighter in color (my opinion)

Member Avatar for diafol

Amazing. My homepage now reflects its current style. thumbshots showed the same old tired style that I changed months and months ago :)

Member Avatar for Dani

And, unlike Thumbshots.com, we're going to be refreshing thumbshots quite regularly.

Be a part of the DaniWeb community

We're a friendly, industry-focused community of developers, IT pros, digital marketers, and technology enthusiasts meeting, networking, learning, and sharing knowledge.